In 1896 Ricketts and Shannon founded the Vale Press. Their aim to was to have complete control over the production of all aspects of the book--including typeface, illustration, and even binding.

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In addition to their illustrations of Wilde's works, they had also illustrated and decorated two other books, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (1893) and Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman (1894), published by the firm of Mathews and Lane. The first Vale Press book, The Early Poems of John Milton, was published in 1896.

Ricketts created three type fonts--the Vale, the Avon, and the King's--for the Vale Press books and also designed elaborate initial letters and intricate decorative borders in an Art Nouveau style.

In 1899 a fire at the Ballantyne Press, where the books were made, resulted in the loss of many of the woodcuts for the decorations. Ricketts and Shannon persevered, completing a 37-volume edition of Shakespeare then in progress, but closed the Vale Press in 1904.

At this point Ricketts began to work at oil-painting, a medium in which Shannon already excelled, specializing in formal portraits, and biblical and classical scenes. Ricketts did not enjoy equal success and, although he continued to do some painting, turned his attention to other artistic pursuits--sculpture, lithography, and jewelry- and stage-design.

He became especially well known for his stage work. Between 1906 and 1931 he was involved in over fifty productions, designing costumes and sets, and sometimes even making properties and lighting the stage.

In addition to their own creative pursuits, Ricketts and Shannon were avid collectors of art. Although their income was always modest, they were able to acquire a diverse collection that included Japanese prints, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, and drawings by such masters as Rembrandt and Rubens. Ricketts was especially canny at recognizing undervalued works. He used this ability to advantage as an advisor to the National Gallery of Canada.

Although they spent their entire adult lives together, Ricketts and Shannon never publicly identified themselves as a homosexual couple. Commentators believe that Ricketts was certainly a homosexual, but Shannon seems at least occasionally to have been attracted to women. His relationship with Kathleen Bruce, of whom he painted several portraits, caused considerable anxiety to Ricketts, who recorded in his diary his fear that Shannon might marry.

In January 1929 Shannon fell while hanging a picture. He never completely recovered his health or senses and remained an invalid until his death in 1937. Ricketts died of heart failure in 1931.

Although some of their remarkable collection of art was sold to provide for Shannon in his final years, many of the Asian pieces now belong to the British Museum, and most of the others are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Several artists and art critics of the nineteenth century achieved a self-aware homosexual identity that is expressed in both their lives and their works, but lesbianism is only rarely depicted in terms of identity during this period.

Set and costume design for stage and film are fields that have attracted a large number of talented gay men and lesbians.

The symbolist movement in painting and literature, which flourished in Europe from 1886 to 1905, was the first self-consciously queer movement in Western art history.

English decadent and Symbolist artist Aubrey Beardsley made a lasting contribution to the art of illustration; a satirist with a gift for caricature and grotesquerie, Beardsley attacked Victorian sexual values.

Lesbian lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, writing as Michael Field, collaborated on a number of plays and eight volumes of verse, many of which had lesbian contents.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Russian-English poet and writer on sexuality, Marc André Raffalovich is best known today as a patron of the arts.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Publisher, book designer, and museum director, Monroe Wheeler was a leading figure in New York artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his partner of sixty-eight years, the writer Glenway Wescott. 

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.